ABSTRACT
Different forms of representation enable and convey different ways of knowing. How can we perform ethnography and fully embrace the particular epistemology/ies of the audio-image through observational cinema? This chapter explores some of the epistemological features of the cinematic form and how one particular style of documentary filmmaking, observational cinema, can be used as an ethnographic research method. This method practically comes down to a selection process in time and space (including subject, activity and context) through the affordances of the techniques of cinema. Due to the immediacy of the cinematic intervention in the encounter with the persons we do our research with, and the way in which this selection process determines the material with which the ethnographer, in collaboration with the subjects of the research, ultimately composes a film, understanding and operationalising the ways in which ethnographic and anthropological intentions and other factors determine the parameters for selection is crucial. In this chapter I define some of the factors or parameters which (can) play a role in the process. I propose that these parameters can and should become part of our reflective process and awareness before, during and after filming, in order to guide the choices we make of what, when, whom and where to film (which are often experienced as intuitive, topical and analytical). This includes a process of socialisation and sensitisation of the body, vision and hearing, and the mind, as well as an active engagement with the persons and environments in our research by fully using the affordances of the medium to reach and convey ethnographic understanding, and the different ways of knowing that the cinematic form enables. Audiovisual ethnography is thus approached as a sensibility that requires awareness and a rigorous process of reflection, apart from the necessary technical training in and understanding of observational cinema as a style of documentary filmmaking.
